How can you improve your KPIs with customer journey analytics?

KPIs measure how well your business or team is achieving your most important user and company goals. KPI metrics act as progress milestones that show whether you’re meeting your targets, helping you make data-informed decisions. Tracking quantifiable, user-centric KPIs across the customer journey helps you understand whether you’re converting and retaining users, and how you can improve the customer experience. We’ve created a ‘KPI starter pack’ for your business: learn which metrics to track—and how—at every point in the buyer’s journey, from the awareness, consideration, decision, and retention stages right through to post-purchase advocacy.

KPIs, simply put are the northstar goals your company or business should be chasing to drive growth. KPIs can be applied to everything, from your personal life to your professional life and as aptly named, Key Performance Indicators, they act as a scorecard to help you understand whether you're doing well or not. That in turn helps you assess your requirements and course correct to improve the "score" on the scorecard. It helps you understand why you are lagging and where you are lagging and what you need to do to improve. Some examples: 1. For marketing -> X number of users acquired at Y CAC. 2. For personal life -> 100 pushups done everyday.

To explain this, I am going to go back in time. Think of this as a game of Mario, where you go through multiple levels to reach to the princess. Each level becomes difficult and more challenging, with more added constraints. Now imagine the same for your product(The Princess), your buyer(Mario) and your discovery process for the user to reach to your product(The Levels). In simple terms, the easier the level, i.e., the easier the discovery process for your product, the quicker a potential buyer will find it and start using it. A customer journey map helps you understand why your level is not so easy for your "Mario" and what can you do to make it easier for your "Mario" to reach the Princess. Track the KPIs related to these steps.

Once you have mapped the customer journey, you should ideally track and report the number of users flowing through each step. For example: your current customer journey map could look like this, Website Visit -> Signup -> Onboarding -> Activation -> Live User Understanding, also read as analysing how many users move through each step, the respective funnel percentages and each data point for each funnel will help you uncover insights related to your customer's journey. Armed with these insights, you can then carry out experiments to improve respective stages of your funnel and optimise them for peak efficiency.